Finishing Taxes. Short note on last night’s WOTF Awards; Boston, fools, drunks, and the United States; and whimsy about dark matter and the speed of light.

View 770 Monday, April 15, 2013

It’s Tax Day

I do mine last day for no particular reason, and there’s no real stress here. I’ve done this for a long time now. It’s just time consuming filling out more and more work sheets with line items that used to be consolidated. We will endure.

Last night was Writers of the Future dinner and awards. Since I tend not to drive at night my son Alex drove me down. Coming back we drove Kevin Anderson and his wife Rebecca back to their hotel on our way home, we all having stayed late to talk to people. The WOTF event gets a bunch of us writers together at their expense and since I don’t go to many SF conventions any more this is a great opportunity to get to meet my friends. Talked to a lot of them, including Col. Doug Beason, Chief Scientist of Space Command. Also some NASA friends. Space isn’t dead yet, and neither is the notion of savable and reusable Earth to LEO launcher development.

It looks to me as if the proper role of NASA and the Air Force (Navy too if they’ll get in on it) is X programs; focus on good technology development. When it comes time for industry to build new craft we’ll have proved out the concepts and can go to production. That’s how we developed the best Air Force in the world. Develop the technology, let the aerospace companies build the spacecraft, and operating companies will fly them. But that’s for another discussion.

We had a nice dinner. Alex found a place at a table with Mike Reznik and Larry Niven and some other writers, and presently there appeared Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson, who professed to be overwhelmed with all the talent she was with. She was one of the award presenters. Very charming.

A few pictures below. I’m in a bit of a hurry.

Nancy Cartwright, voice of Bart Simpson and a charming dinner companion.

WOTF is organized and they take a lot of pictures of crowds of people who don’t want to spend a lot of time being posed for photographs. There are about fifty of us on stage being posed. I thought it fair to take a shot of them at work. Like most of what they do it’s all professional and everyone is as nice as possible given the time pressures…

Backstage operations. Lousy picture but you get the idea. I am sure there are tons of photos and videos at the WOTF site.

It’s late in the day and I have to print and sign the taxes. I should be near normal tomorrow. I hope.

There is news from Boston but you’ll know more about it than I do in ten minutes. They either do or do not have a suspect in custody who either is or is not a Saudi native. The one thing we can be sure of is that no one saw this one coming. The Terror War is not over.

Jerry,

If you want to post this, feel free to shorten it…

You wrote that no one saw it coming, with regards to the Boston bombings. Is that really what you meant to write? I think we’ve "seen it coming" since 9/11 even if the short attention span crowd prefers to forget what happened and why. Islamist extremist terrorism aside, I’ve personally been waiting for the next attack since the Oklahoma City bombing.

Although as a declining republic we are creeping towards totalitarianism in the name of the common "good", we are still a largely open society and that makes us about as soft a target as it gets for any flavor of terrorism you could think of. OK City. Unabomber. WTC 1. 9/11. Anthrax letters. What strikes me is that while effective as terror attacks and of course devastating to the victims, except for 9/11 they were all amateur efforts. While the specific target this time was not known in advance we have known for a long time that there WILL be more attacks.

Creating a restricted society won’t help but we can try to be prepared to effectively deal with them when they do occur. Just like airplanes and gyms now have automatic defibrillators hanging on every wall, simple trauma kits could be cheaply pre-positioned anywhere large numbers of people gather. All they really need to contain are nasal-pharyngeal airway tubes, battlefield compression dressings/bandages, battlefield tourniquets, quik-clot gauze (magic stuff!), and a box of those latex-free gloves. With just those items, you could keep a whole lot of people alive for the 15-30 minutes it would take before medical personnel arrive, and every military or recent ex-military member would know how to use those supplies because we’ve ALL been taught how to use them. It’s relatively cheap, and they will last almost indefinitely if packaged properly. They need to be clearly visible though, since the first responder may be Joe Citizen and he doesn’t have a key to the supply closet.

If they want to easily protect against low-tech chemical weapon attacks, there would need to be kits with plastic sheets and lots of duct tape (plus signs saying "door sealed from inside – do not open"). This would be surprisingly effective if the threatened people have enough tape and feel motivated to seal up all the room openings until decon crews arrive. Military pilots in a chem weapon scenario travelling between shelter and their aircraft do so wearing what is really just a large clear plastic bag over their other protective gear, because it is an effective temporary barrier.

In this case, the attacker(s) probably made a serious tactical error. While the attack will have its desired terror effect in terms of forcing us to "do something!!!111one", the death toll will be a mere fraction of what it would have been had the bombs not gone off within sight of the well staffed aid stations already in place for the runners. From many initial reports, some rather horrific injuries were survived only because there were so many medical personnel on scene within seconds of the blasts. I even saw some pictures of some military members getting a chance to practice their battlefield first aid. Had this attack occurred at a "normal" mass gathering or other event, everyday citizens would have been providing the immediate care and as we found in our recent wars, the first few minutes of care is utterly critical when it comes to surviving the types of injuries you get from improvised explosive devices.

S

What I meant was that no one in authority saw it coming.  They don’t see much because they have a mind set.  As to how many hard line old pros saw this coming, that’s another story.  Of course a fairly large and fairly official part of Islam now sees it incumbent on themselves to renew the Holy War, and put all the People of the Book into either conversion or submission with tribute. It is, after all, directly commanded.

The West didn’t realize the Cold War was on until it was nearly over and now it has been forgotten that it was once very real with the possibility of some very dangerous outcomes.  Of course our modern intellectual establishment doesn’t believe in that sort of thing because they don’t believe in much of anything, so even when faced with fanatics who are willing to die while trying to kill for the cause they continue with clinical language and speak of disorders.

It is said that God looks out for fools, drunks, and the United States of America. Perhaps that is not true but the people of Boston have much to be thankful for.

And yes, I got my taxes posted on time. Now I can come up for air.  Now it’s late and time for bed. Mailbag tomorrow, and maybe a few more words on a strategy of technology.

One Note.  I’ve been reading a lot about dark matter and dark energy, and how the universe is about 75% dark this that and the other, and we know this because things are farther away than they should be, and some of them are moving faster than they should. And none of it makes a lot of sense.

Special relativity says that the speed of light is constant, relative to any observer, and there is no aether in which light or gravity waves. Michelson, whose Michelson-Morley experiment was fundamental to the abolition of ether, never accepted either general or special relativity. Of course relativity is pretty well agreed to by everyone, although in fact most of those who agree to it neve4r thought much about it and can’t actually defend the theory from attacks such as the existence of spectroscopic binaries.  (They are very difficult to explain under relativity. It takes highly complex tensor mathematics to account for them, whereas the ether theory of Michelson as expanded by Petr Beckmann manages that with a algebra.)  All of this has me wondering: if we use Beckmann’s ether (which is the local gravitational field) then we do not need to assume that our local velocity of light is the same as the velocity of light in deep deep space where the gravitational field is much thinner.  Waves travel slower in thinner media.  Out between the galaxies it’s thin indeed. I don’t think we have any way of measuring the actual speed of light out there.  And of course waves speed up in dense media; the gravity field of a major galaxy, itself salted with dark matter assuming there is dark matter, would be a great deal stronger than out between the galaxies. 

Physicists have assumed dark matter makes the galaxies “heavier” than they would be without it, which explains why they whirl faster than they should, but no one has found dark matter. Other physics theorists see the galaxies plunging away from us faster than they ought to, and assume dark energy which pushes them.

But if light speed changes with the density of the ether, and ether is in any way related to gravity (as for instance if its associated with dark matter) then we really don’t know how far away the distant galaxies are.

I haven’t the math skills to put this into equations, and I suspect I can no longer tool up to learn enough; but it all seems suspicious to me. Ether was postulated as the medium that light could wave in. It wasn’t suppose to do anything else. It pervaded everything but you couldn’t actually contain it or manipulate it: characteristics it shares with dark matter. 

This is a very half baked idea, a cocktail party theory on the order of my view of the influence of dogs on the evolution of human intelligence, but the more I keep turning it over and over the more I wonder.  Dark matter would be thin between the galaxies.  And I think I’d rather believe in dark matter than dark energy.

And lest you think I have gone mad, I haven’t. I just wanted to get my wild idea written down, so someone can blow it away with experimental evidence or even a good thought experiment…  Those who read this last night will have noted that I got some of it backwards, which wouldn’t have been a problem if I hadn’t been in a hurry to get to bed. Potentially embarrassing.